Artisan Cheese Makers Abound In Sonoma & Marin
October 21, 2011 | 1 min to read
If Seana Doughty wants a motto for her new Bleating Heart creamery, she might consider "No Guts, No Glory."
Doughty's saga of transformation from bored office paper pusher to professional cheese maker has enough cliff-hanging plot twists for the big screen. Imagine Meg Ryan as the naive but indomitable cheese enthusiast who buys a used truck on Craigslist and corrals her sister for a road trip to Wisconsin, in a blinding snowstorm, to pick up her starter flock of pregnant ewes.
"Operation Sheep-o-Rama" is what Doughty calls her hair-raising adventure, and it's a good thing that most would-be cheese makers don't face similar tests of character or we wouldn't have many cheese makers. Instead, the Bay Area dairy fraternity has swelled in the last couple of years, with several new producers introducing creations in recent months.
Twenty years after Bellwether Farms made its first sheep's milk wheels in Petaluma, artisan cheese making in Marin and Sonoma counties has reached critical mass.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: San Francisco Chronicle